Posts Tagged ‘aliens’

It’s 4am. The barely rustling trees hide the traces of moonlight from the cracks in the windows. I’m jolted awake by what feels like a longing for something. But not that.

It bolts across the room just quick enough to outrun my strained gaze through the solitary light of the flickering television. An old kung-fu movie is on. On the screen a nameless kung-fu master steps onto the grounds of a massive fortress. He dusts himself off and tightens his wrist wraps. I fear we may both soon face our battles with Goliath. The volume is down, but for a dull hum that I probably won’t hear in 30 years.

My head snaps across the room trying to follow it, but lands on nothing but the blackness outside the television’s glare. I stare for a few seconds, trying not to let the darkness pull my eyes right out of my sockets.

Nothing.

I turn back to the television, let out a lion’s yawn and rub my dry eyes. Blinking furiously I scan the room again. Please let it just be my imagination. I think I see it in the corner, no wait, the other corner. No wait, it’s sitting on my chair! I can hear it laughing that maniacal laugh, staring at me through the black of night with it’s shadow-black eyes.

All the world’s wars pale in comparison to the bodies it has stacked up in its bloody wake, laughing its way to the top of the food chain. It brings not just death but oblivion; indiscriminate, this monster relentlessly kills all in its path and does it silently, leaving no trace like a true boy scout. Stories ring in my ears of being eaten from the inside and devoured in your sleep. Some it ends slowly, others with lightning speed. Visions flash across my frantic mind of stone grey children and empty bodies, stiff as boards but frail as fiberglass strewn out on cots, sweating away the last drops of their lives. Some it just teases and plays with only to haunt the darkest dreams. It laughs again and I hear the tortured souls left writhing and screaming in schizophrenia deep into the night. It is a true testament to power and veracity, savagery and skill.

I try to forget all this and close my eyes. I pull the covers up to my head and hope that it won’t see me. Or maybe it will simply forget. Maybe it will just leave. Maybe it will just slip away into the night and find a juicier piece of meat for it’s midnight snack. Maybe I’m actually an eskimo and it’s just an alien riding a polar bear. I wish. I doubt it.

I hear the laugh again, faint at first then loud as I probably was to my older siblings: painfully relentless. I shoot up and flail wildly.

Did I get it? Is it dead? Have I been the one this time to strike the killing blow?

Pipe dreams.

If God graces me lucky enough to make it out of this I promise a life equally relentless. With enough time I could hunt extinct this scourge sent straight from Satan’s doorstep. All I need is time…

There it is! It bolts across the flickering line of the television’s sight. Or did I? No, now it’s back over where it was! Like a lion playing with the broken body of a baby gazelle, it’s toying with me, teasing me with the illusion of safety. If only it would stay in the light…

I squint to try and catch a glance of the shadowed killer but the darkness is its home. I am but a visitor here.

I reach for my bottle of lukewarm water. With my eyes fixed on the shadow I unscrew the cap and take a swig. My body is weak. My mind, strained. My will is dwindling with the plausibility of this kung-fu master’s success.

I hear it laugh again and I can barely muster enough energy to look fierce in the face of this ancient, unstoppable monster. I can’t do it. I’ll never win. My arms are too slow and weak. My blind eyes are useless. My ears feel like they’ve forgotten every sound but its piercing laugh.

I fear this may be it, this may be the end of the line. I try and accept my fate. Soon I will join the innumerable others who have fallen to the same fate, if insanity doesn’t take me first.

No! There it is, coming in for the attack! With the last burst of strength left in me I swing my arm around and hit the bastard. Or did I?

Nothing.

In the flickering light of the kung-fu master’s dazzling display I spot the tiniest stroke of crimson on my palm. Hah! Not me, oh devilish winds of fate and fortune, this soul is not yet yours to whisk away. My painful vigilance has paid off this time. This time…

I turn off the television. My bottle only has a little left but I take another small swig anyway. I will save the rest for the morning. I slink back down and close my eyes. As my mind begins to melt away into kaleidoscope dreams, I hear something seemingly miles away; there it is, the faint laughter of the shadows…

Fucking mosquitos.

Z

“If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in the dark with a mosquito.” — Betty Reese

Can you imagine what the world would look like without war? We all say we want peace but none of us have ever really even experienced it; so how do we know what we’re talking about? There has never been a time in history of true peace, at least since humans showed up. In the animal kingdom there is death but only in circumstances where survival is at stake. It’s natural that at some point a “me or you” situation may arise, but only out of necessity like hunger or immediate bodily harm. The only instances even resembling temporary peace we people have ever experienced have been peace through superior firepower, which is no different than beating a child into submission and declaring them well-behaved. At some point it becomes necessary to take a leap of faith and just imagine it – or try at least.

John Lennon put his own version of peace into words and was killed for it, just like Martin Luther King Jr. Take a second and let that sink in. It’s common knowledge that advocators of real peace are often killed for doing so, but consider just how paradoxical that is, and just how powerful of an effect that knowledge has on our minds. Of course people think war is inevitable, we’ve been at war our whole lives. We don’t know anything else. But just because we’ve never seen another world, that doesn’t mean it can’t exist. And it’s important to understand that the first step toward addressing any issue is to become aware of the words that we use to do so. To say a world without war can’t exist admits defeat before the possibility of debate even starts. In sales school I became hyperaware of “self-talk.” “Self-talk” is what happens when you are alone with yourself. That voice in your head? It’s your mind expressing itself in symbols you can understand. But those symbols aren’t random, and nor are they originate externally. Except in cases of severe mental illness, you choose the words you speak to yourself. So in English, when it comes to speaking to yourself about ability, there are five levels: “I can’t,” “I can,” “I will,” “I am,” and “it is.” I can’t do it. I can do it. I will do it. I am doing it. It is happening. The same applies for every type of speech about any subject. Addressing issues is first and foremost dependent on the words we are using to do so. In the timeless words of Mark Twain, the difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and lightning bug.

War is orchestrated and executed. Pun intended. George Carlin, the late great comedian known for his vulgarity and ruthlessness had a dream too. His was simple but profound and like much of his material, focused on the words we use; he wanted to switch the acceptability levels of the words “fuck” and “kill.” One represents the most intimate and natural of acts but is widely shunned, while the other represents the essence of destruction and is plastered all over the evening news. Coincidence? I think not. As John Lennon believed, to strip away our socially constructed barriers and “stop inviting walls into wide open spaces” would finally bring the world together as one, but as it stands far too many have far too much invested in the opposite. From defence contractors to privatized prisons to newspapers that pay more for photos of war than of love, our world is made up of people and institutions that profit from establishing enemies and maintaining boundaries, not cooperating and dissolving them. But who knows, maybe one day we’ll stop cutting off each others’ heads over invisible friends, or dumping our trash into the oceans, or using power to make ourselves wealthy, or blowing up mountains instead of investing in renewable resources, or stepping over homeless people while foreclosed homes sit empty, or locking drug addicts up in cages, or shooting people for talking about fucking love.

Maybe the aliens will have to land for us to see each other as comrades, but maybe we can reach this conclusion on our own. I like to think there are enough candle-carriers out there to light up the darkness. And you may say I’m a dreamer, but hey, I’m not the only one.

Sadly, this week nine U.N. peacekeepers were killed in northeast Mali. To date this is the largest attack on peacekeepers by extremists since the invasion in the north began in 2011. For the sake of relevance, today’s post is a brief outline of the situation in Mali, one of Africa’s most vibrant nations.

It all started with Gaddafi. Muammar Gaddafi ruled Libya from 1969 to 2011, when he was forcibly removed. When his dynasty fell, Western powers were ecstatic. A brutal, socialist dictator had fallen. Not everyone was as relieved with his removal however. In Mali, then-president Amadou Toumani Tourè was heavily invested in and closely tied to Gaddafi’s regime. If you look around Bamako, Mali’s capital city, you can still see numerous grand hotels, offices, and ministerial buildings littering the landscape, all financed by Gaddafi’s bloody empire. As a result, after Gaddafi’s fall in 2011 – while other countries scrambled to protect their borders from waves of armed Gaddafi supporters fleeing Libya – President Tourè effectively turned his back to the issue. Unconcerned with the wandering rebels, Tourè left Mali’s vast northern border, which digs deep into the massive Sahara desert, totally unguarded.

The second piece of this puzzle dates back way before Gaddafi or any of his opposing Western nations. I refer of course, to the Tuaregs. The rebels may have slipped into Mali in 2011, but the Tuaregs have been here since, like… 1011. The Tuareg people are the people of the Sahara. They are a nomadic tribe of herders who have traversed the dunes of the Sahara for centuries, some dating them back as early as the 4th or 5th. One of the main issues the Tuaregs have always faced is their lack of land. They travel through the various countries that stretch into their ancient Saharan grazing lands, surviving but longing for more stability. Fast forward to the past twenty years alone and their land has diminished tenfold. Africa’s population as a whole has just about doubled in the last twenty years. In the countries that border the Sahara, this means farmlands have expanded deeper into its dry landscape. Bigger cities and wider reaching farmlands have drastically cut traditional Tuareg grazing lands, causing many Tuaregs to take up initiatives to fight for permanent grazing lands of their own.

The National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), as they call themselves, have been part of a series of campaigns for land stretching back to the early 1900’s. In 2011 the region’s armed Tuaregs teamed up with those insurgents fleeing the Libyan civil war, and under the banner of the MNLA, staged the first attack associated with this particular conflict on January 16th, 2012. However there were other forces tied to these Libyan insurgents. Little did the Tuaregs know, much of the MNLA was essentially financed by the Islamist group, Ansar Dine. Unfortunately, this meant that once the MLNA had pushed the Malian military out of what they call Azawad, the northern half of Mali, the Islamists cemented their presence and declared radical Sharia, or doctrinal Islamic law. Such law meant things like women’s rights vanished, non-religious texts and music were banned, and other non-Islamic institutions (like monuments, bars, and secular libraries) were destroyed. The significance of this is tragic if we consider the extensive wealth of worldly knowledge housed at one of the world’s oldest centers of trade; Timbuktu. Once the Tuareg fighters realized the Islamist agenda of their allies, they separated themselves from the extremists and even tried fighting them off themselves, but were no match. The foothold had been established; by July 2012 Islamists ran the north.

Well, needless to say, the Malian people were not too happy to find out that their president had essentially laid out a red carpet for these heavily armed extremists in the north, so on March 22nd, 2012, Captain Amadou Sanogo led a military coup d’etat and ousted President Tourè. Fun fact: the coup was staged in the ministerial compound right down the street from my house! It looks overgrown and planet-of-the-apes-esque now, but neighbors say just a couple years ago they remember hearing the sirens and gunshots clearly.

In January of 2013 the Malian military, who was running the country’s interim government, appealed to the international world for aid in defeating the northern extremists. Strategically, Mali poses a great threat to French stability, as the northern region is one of the closest French territories to France itself, just across the Mediterranean Sea. So the French military intervened and, with the help of the U.N., took back the northern territories and chased the guerrillas into the desert. Though the military had taken back control over the northern cities however, the war was far from finished.

In July of 2013, with help from the West, elections were “successfully” held in Bamako, and Ibrahim Boubacar Keita became the President we have today. Though President Keita is not affiliated with Gaddafi, he has not exactly been the country’s savior either. So far he has pretty much just gotten a few friends some pretty nice jobs, and bought himself a fresh new plane to travel in to Washington. Trash still overflows the gutters and streams, half-finished construction projects still litter the capital and its surrounding cities, and U.N., French, and Portuguese forces still provide the strongest barrier between the extremists and the country’s major population centers.

This brings us to today. Earlier this week the largest single attack on U.N. peacekeepers was carried out in the northeastern Menaka-Asongo corridor. Nine peacekeepers from Niger were killed when their convoy was attacked by assailants on motorbikes, raising the death-toll of UN peacekeepers alone to 26 since their intervention in Mali. The U.N. currently has 9,000 soldiers stationed in Mali, in addition to French and Portuguese forces, and though elections have passed and the the northern territories have been officially reclaimed by the military, officials are adamant that they are here to stay until the situation is actually under control.

What does that mean? How long will that take? Well, now we touch on the issue of global extremism. It seems the fight against the Islamist state in the Middle East is rearing its ugly head in more and more regions, and the war in Mali marks a major security risk to international stability. Mali is a foothold for both sides of this fight, so neither plans to give up with ease. Unfortunately the heavy-handed tactics of the West give birth to more and more anti-Western sentiment as attacks against yet another mobile enemy decimate cities throughout the Middle East, which means people around the world are adopting more and more reasons to hate. We aren’t even fighting fire with fire, we’re fighting gunpowder with matches.

How do we stop all this, then? It’s unfortunate, but it seems the U.S. and the U.N. Security Council doesn’t even really want to. We know ISIS is funded primarily by Saudi Arabia, but the Saudi’s remain one of America’s strongest allies. Why? Well, as long as they promise to keep trading all that Saudi oil in dollars, they keep the dollar valuable, and the last thing the U.S. wants is to make room for a new Saudi regime that might decide to stray from that path, much like Saddam (and Gaddafi) planned to do. So until we decide to hit ISIS and other extremist groups where it hurts most, in their pockets like everyone else, Western-led assaults will most likely only stir up more hatred in these regions, and doom the world to endless escalating conflict.

I am 24. My country, the United States, has been at war since I was a child. I have known a life of privilege, but no-one my age has ever known a life of peace. I fear my children may share my fate. I don’t know how to fix this muddy, bloody mess, but I know one thing for sure; there are people out there with violence and hatred in their hearts, but that hatred is useless without the resources necessary to act it out. Can the whole world really be expected to work together to truly end all this unnecessary violence? Will anything short of the impending alien invasion bring us together in peace? I sure hope so. I may be cynical about the present, but I am optimistic about the future.

That’s it for my own take on the situation at hand, friends. Thanks for following along. Following are some things others have produced that I cannot help but think of at this time. I welcome your comments and concerns. This is a delicate and volatile issue that must be addressed in its entirety if we ever expect to rid ourselves of this barbarism.

Argument on Bill Maher’s ‘Real Time’ over the inherent violence in Islamic doctrine. Disclaimer (and believe me, I know this gets touchy): I agree with Bill Maher, but don’t think he goes far enough. Religious followers are not necessarily bad people, nor are they necessarily good. The fact of the matter is that every religious doctrine promotes violence in some way or another. The only variation is how closely the violent words are followed within each faith. And that may not even be much of a difference at all. Nevertheless the issue is that these works promote violence in certain contexts and that simply ignoring the instances where this is true does nothing to prevent violent people from using “faith” and dedication to these doctrines to justify the violence in their own hearts. This video marks a classic and beautiful failure in communication. Entertaining at the very least. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IafWePD1DVw

And finally, I am reminded of Robert Kennedy, on the “mindless menace of violence” in the America he fought and died for. Oddly enough, my favorite speech of his, given 22 years before I was born, to the day. Heh.

Robert F. Kennedy
Cleveland City Club
April 5, 1968

“This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity to speak briefly to you about this mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.

It is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one – no matter where he lives or what he does – can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on.

Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr’s cause has ever been stilled by his assassin’s bullet.

No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of the people.

Whenever any American’s life is taken by another American unnecessarily – whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence – whenever we tear at the fabric of life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.

“Among free men,” said Abraham Lincoln, “there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs.”

Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire weapons and ammunition they desire.

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach nonviolence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some looks for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear; violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleaning of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

This is the breaking of a man’s spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all. I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies – to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community, men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear – only a common desire to retreat from each other – only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this there are no final answers.

Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is now what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of human purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of all. We must admit in ourselves that our own children’s future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

But we can perhaps remember – even if only for a time – that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short movement of life, that they seek – as we do – nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our hearts brothers and countrymen once again.”

I hope this all sparked something inside you. Whether you agree or disagree with my own interpretations, I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter. Until next time Internet, kambufo! (Bye!)